Last summer Leslie Pietrzyk taught a beginning novel writing class at The Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and I was one of her students. This Iowa native is down to earth and occasionally fidgets with her silver charm bracelet. I learned the importance of grounding story in place, to always ask a lot of questions, and that writers are a nosy group. In early November, we sat down for a Thai dinner and talked about writing, teaching, death, alcoholism, stubbornness, and food.
Folio: What's your writing process?
LP: If I can, I try to write every afternoon, Monday through Friday, 1:00 - 6:00. And by "if I can" I mean if I'm not teaching, which has been taking up a lot of time lately. I sit at my computer and I try to - try to - avoid distractions. Most of the time, I don't feel like writing, but I sit there until I do and if I sit there long enough, something does come up.
Folio: What is your revision process like?
LP: I love revision - it's my favorite part of writing! The first draft is so hard for me but I love revision because I know my whole story. I know where I want to go, and if I've done my job well, usually I discover some new exciting stuff by the time I finish. My first first draft is incredibly messy. Then I make some structural revisions, get it shaped up enough so that someone could read it. I print it all and go from the printed copy to really refine things and make it perfect and polished. Usually I discover new stuff in there too. Then I put those changes in the computer. And read it out loud and make more changes and then consider it finished - at least for now.
Also, I belong to a writing group and, at some point in that process, I'll get their input. Many of us are working on novels and it's so valuable to have a place to show a novel, chapter by chapter. A Year and a Day went through the whole writing group. There are drawbacks to that, if you can imagine reading a novel, one chapter every other month for three or four years. Definitely the writing group helped make A Year and a Day a better book and they're in the process of reading my new novel as well.
Folio: What do you love most about writing - what aspect of it keeps you coming back?
LP: There's so many things that I love about writing. I couldn't even imagine my life without writing. But I think what I love the most is the chance to sort of be somebody else for a while. I have written stories about baseball players and hockey players and El Salvadorian immigrants, and men, little boys - things I will never be. I love the challenge of having to think from a different perspective and try and tease that out and figure out what a baseball player might think about. I love writing also because it's sort of the way I make sense of my life. I'm sure a lot of people have said that, but I can always tell when I haven't been doing enough writing. I get very crabby and irritable; it feels like things are breaking down and I need to get back to writing to sort out my mind.
Folio: What's your cure for writer's block?
LP: I try not to let myself believe in writer's block. I don't think I've ever had what I perceive to be true writer's block. I do believe if you sit there long enough, you type some words, try something, something will come to you. There's certainly been times when I've been less fruitful than others and when I've stopped purposefully writing to take a break. Even if you're not writing, you're out living, you're observing things, you're thinking, your subconscious is working and so no time is wasted. In fact, sometimes that's a drawback - that I can't really escape being a writer or seeing the world as a writer. I don't think that means you have to write every single minute. Or feel guilty if you want to go to the Hudson Valley for a week, as I did in September, and not write.
Folio: When you write about these people that are so far away from you - the hockey player, Ginger, the alcoholic character in Pears On A Willow Tree - what kind of research do you do?
LP: I loved writing about Ginger, because in many ways she's a very unlikable person - nobody would want to be her best friend or her mother - but what I wanted to do was explore her point of view. So to do research, I did read a lot of books about alcoholism- not necessarily clinical books- but sort of psychology books: this is what it's like for children of alcoholics, what it's like for alcoholics. I talked to some people who had been to Alcoholics Anonymous, and frankly I had a writer's moral dilemma. I thought about going to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, an open meeting. I knew I was going in a voyeuristic way and if somebody told some story that I thought was a good story, I'd have to use it and that would be unfair, so I didn't go to the meeting. But I talked to people who have been and used the psychology behind it.
Folio: How much of your fiction includes things plucked out of your real life or friends' experiences?
LP: Overall, there's always something that creeps in, even bizarre things. A couple of years ago I took up jogging, and all of a sudden I have a lot of stories of people running or people on tracks. That's a really benign example of how my life creeps in. I love cooking and I love food so there's a lot of food in my writing, always those kinds of details but I don't think there's that much of the big stuff. Things from my life are usually small details rather than large plot points.
Folio: How did your short story writing prepare you to write novels? How is writing a novel different than writing a short story?
LP: Writing short stories was very helpful. It's very daunting to sit down and think, "Oh, I'm going to write 300 pages." Graduate writing programs and creative writing classes try to focus people on, "Okay, try writing twenty pages, and see how that goes." So I was sort of trained in this idea of writing short stories. I started noticing that a lot of my short stories had a type of character and the same setting and the same kind of theme and that gave me the confidence to think well, maybe I can string together a novel. And before Pears On A Willow Tree, I actually wrote three novels that never got published. So those short stories were a good entry into that and with Pears On A Willow Tree, specifically, I didn't know I was writing a novel. I just wrote a story about four characters, four women, making pierogi, and I had more questions about them so I wrote another story and another story. Then I thought, Okay, it's time, you can write a novel about these people. The other nice thing about writing that way for that book was that I could write these stories or chapters and get them published and get a little bit of affirmation.
Folio: What has been the most valuable to you as a writer, and toward accomplishing your goals as a writer, and why?
LP: For me, what has been most valuable is my incredible stubbornness, which is also probably a drawback in my personal life, but this feeling that I knew I was not going to give up until I published a novel. I knew there was nothing that could make me stop writing and make me stop trying. When I say three novels that I wrote didn't get published - that's like 900 pages sitting in a drawer now. Some of it for sure did not deserve to be published. And to go through that experience, to spend two years writing a book to not get it published, and then to write another one and another one - you have to be really stubborn. In Pears On A Willow Tree, the characters are talking about Polish stubborn women and that is my Polish heritage.
Folio: Tell me about teaching. Do you find working with new or beginning creative writers to be inspiring, draining, or both?
LP: I really love teaching, which sort of surprised me. What I really love about it is that it helps me focus my own thoughts about writing and encourages me to read a lot of writing books or revisit writing books, sort of re-learn things and see how they apply to my own work. It's also exciting to see students' work really take off or to see them applying the things you've been talking about in class in their own work. That's really great, and it helps focus my mind about my own work.
Folio: What authors have inspired you?
LP: In the Johns Hopkins graduate class, I had everybody read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and what is amazing to me is that any question that comes up in class - plot, introducing characters, point of view, flashbacks - can be answered or looked at to see how Fitzgerald did it in The Great Gatsby. It's an incredible book in that way. It's not a perfect book, but it's very close to being perfect.
Folio: In a recent interview you cite Julia Cameron's The Writer's Way as a good resource for people wanting to return to or explore writing. Cameron makes a great point about removing a lot of societal definitions and expectations about what a writer is, and urging each individual to find their own voice. In your opinion, what is a writer, and how can a person begin writing in the face of what a writer is supposed to be?
LP: There are different ways of being a writer and all are perfectly satisfying, depending on what one wants. For example, some of the people at The Writer's Center just want to write their life story for their children to read or figure out their own life and emotions. That's perfectly fine. And there are ways to help people do that kind of writing. There are people who have a book or a story that they've always wanted to write and, again, there are ways to teach and encourage that. Some of those people will be happy to self-publish their book and give it to their family and friends because this is the story they've just always wanted to write and I think that's great too. And then there are people who are trying to maybe have a greater ambition which is to create art, which is also something a good teacher can help and encourage. It sounds so arrogant or egotistical, but that's my goal, that is what I'm doing trying to do with my writing. I have no illusions that I'm anywhere close, but I kind of like having a goal that's so distant that it keeps me interested in moving forward. If you're putting words on the page in a purposeful manner and you're trying to be better at it, then you can call yourself a writer, proudly and happily.
Folio: Because you compose Pears on a Willow Tree by alternating perspectives of all of the women in the novel, was it difficult to maintain the same intensity of "being in the brain" of one character, when you knew the next chapter you would be writing from the eyes of someone else?
LP: To me, Helen was the most difficult. And the chapter Those Places I've Been was put in last, at the suggestion of the editor, after the book was sold. She said, "I don't think I know Helen enough," which was a very excellent observation. Amy was my generation so I could think about her in that way, I was imagining my great-grandmother as Rose and creating her life, and then Ginger, the alcoholic, was so fascinating to me, and Helen got a little bit lost. So I started thinking about her and it turns out she does have a very interesting, sad story. I speak at a lot of book clubs, and that chapter where she has the suitcases and can't quite bring herself to leave, people often mention that as one of the saddest moments and one of the most telling parts of the book.
Folio: Do you see A Year and a Day as an answer to some larger cultural question that is being addressed?
LP: A Year and a Day arose in my life from two different things. One is that my mother is still alive, but her mother died when she was thirteen and that death - it wasn't a suicide - had immense ramifications for my mother through her whole life and even for me. It was this thing that we never talked about. The other thing that made me write A Year and a Day was that my thirty-seven-year-old husband died abruptly of a heart attack so I had this experience of sudden loss the way Alice does. What I learned after that was people have a really hard time talking about death and understanding it. Nobody understands it, but people can't talk about it, and I just felt I needed to and I couldn't talk about it in my own exact experiences, so I created Alice as a way to explore that. Because even though Alice's question after her mother commits suicide is, "Why did my mother commit suicide?" it's really so much greater a question, which is, "Why do people die?" And there's no answer to that. Obviously, there's a biological answer, but that's not really very satisfying.
Folio: This is our last question. In both novels, food is a gateway for communication. Is this motif deliberate or an element that naturally evolved from your writing?
LP: That's an interesting comment and a good way of putting it. Maybe this is what I love most about writing, about how magical it can be. I love Thanksgiving and I love cooking and I've already started planning all my fifteen side dishes. So I put that in there because I'm interested in it but then it takes on greater meaning and serves these other purposes. And that is what I really love about writing, how the subconscious mind works things out in a miraculous kind of way.
